New York's Sandy Scorecard by Nicole Gelinas, City Journal WInter 2013
What worked, what didn’t, and what the city should do when future storms threaten
WInter 2013
WInter 2013
The storm that tore up New York’s coastlines on Monday, October 29, was no longer a hurricane when it hit land, but a weaker post-tropical cyclone. Nor did Superstorm Sandy, as it came to be called, directly hit the city; it made landfall more than 100 miles south, near Atlantic City, New Jersey. Sandy “wasn’t the big one,” says Nicholas K. Coch, a professor of sedimentology and coastal geology at Queens College.
But it was big enough. As New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out, Sandy “coincided with a full moon and a high tide, and it collided with a second weather front that made it take a hard left turn.” That turn positioned Sandy just south of New York, so that its counterclockwise winds “drove the water right towards New York City.” Sandy killed 43 city residents, caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage, and will probably reduce New York’s gross city product (a local version of GDP) by nearly a percentage point. For months after the storm, parts of lower Manhattan, the Rockaways in Queens, Coney Island in Brooklyn, and Staten Island have remained disaster areas.
Nearly a month after Sandy hit, New York governor Andrew Cuomo created three blue-ribbon commissions to analyze the state’s response and recommend long-term investments for future “major weather events.” Bloomberg, for his part, said in early December that city officials would develop a “specific and comprehensive action plan” to confront storms in the future. The conclusion that all these groups should draw is now evident: the institutions that worked well before Sandy worked well afterward; those that didn’t failed the test. And the biggest challenges, as New York works to protect itself from major storms, will be political and fiscal, not technical. For all Cuomo’s musing about how “it’s going to be a rethinking, redesign of how we protect this metropolitan area,” what really needs rethinking is the state and local politics that have created dysfunctional agencies and funded them nonsensically.
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But it was big enough. As New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out, Sandy “coincided with a full moon and a high tide, and it collided with a second weather front that made it take a hard left turn.” That turn positioned Sandy just south of New York, so that its counterclockwise winds “drove the water right towards New York City.” Sandy killed 43 city residents, caused tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage, and will probably reduce New York’s gross city product (a local version of GDP) by nearly a percentage point. For months after the storm, parts of lower Manhattan, the Rockaways in Queens, Coney Island in Brooklyn, and Staten Island have remained disaster areas.
Nearly a month after Sandy hit, New York governor Andrew Cuomo created three blue-ribbon commissions to analyze the state’s response and recommend long-term investments for future “major weather events.” Bloomberg, for his part, said in early December that city officials would develop a “specific and comprehensive action plan” to confront storms in the future. The conclusion that all these groups should draw is now evident: the institutions that worked well before Sandy worked well afterward; those that didn’t failed the test. And the biggest challenges, as New York works to protect itself from major storms, will be political and fiscal, not technical. For all Cuomo’s musing about how “it’s going to be a rethinking, redesign of how we protect this metropolitan area,” what really needs rethinking is the state and local politics that have created dysfunctional agencies and funded them nonsensically.
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